Adobe harmonises Aussie Creative Cloud prices

blog Wow. That was fast. Hot on the heels of news of Federal Parliament’s decision to summon Adobe (alongside Apple and Microsoft) to answer questions about its Australian pricing habits, the recalcitrant vendor has this afternoon revealed plans to harmonise the local prices of at least one of its product lines, Creative Cloud, with its US prices. It’s a pity that not many people use the platform yet (everyone I know prefers to buy Adobe Creative Suite outright, so far), but at least the company has made an effort. You see, democracy does work. Adobe’s media release:

“Adobe Creative Cloud Gaining Steam in Australia and New Zealand

Adobe Creative Cloud momentum is building in Australia and New Zealand. The comprehensive service from Adobe provides members with access to all Creative Suite 6 applications as well as services that enable creative customers to sync, store and share their work. Most importantly, Creative Cloud members automatically get access to new products and exclusive updates as soon as they’re released.

Adobe just added new training features, file synchronisation and sharing capabilities, digital publishing services and significant updates to a number of tools, including Photoshop. Adobe recently acquired Behance, a leading online social media platform that enables creatives to showcase and share their work. The acquisition of Behance accelerates Adobe’s strategy to bring great community features to Creative Cloud, with the goal of making it the ultimate hub for creatives in Australia and New Zealand. Adobe is also rolling out Creative Cloud for teams, a new cloud offering specifically tailored for small and medium businesses in this region.

As Adobe continues to attract membership to its cloud offerings, it is evolving its product offering to provide increased value to subscribers, including new pricing for customers in Australia and New Zealand. Creative Cloud membership pricing in Australia for individuals has been reduced to AU$49.99 on an annual subscription per month for new and current customers, effective immediately.”

I would say it’s more like they are harmonising where the price discrimination is indefensible. I’m sure they’ll make some argument about Australian support or some other bullshit with non-cloud versions.

It’s definitely all supported out of India. Also all the useful support options are US only – the 3rd party, scripted support from India has no support from Adobe so your requests/incidents/bu reports drop into a black hole.
We pay far more for far less!

If they and others bring all prices to a matched level, excluding GST, that is a real step in the right direction. I will wait and see if anything else changes. I don’t think it will.

I am still disappointed they have not included bricks and mortar pricing. I know we have higher costs and less people to buy the products, but I want to know whether wholesale prices our retailers get is competitive with other countries. Is there also a middleman that is pocketing a more than reasonable share? Is that middleman just a subsidiary of the company manufacturing the product? These business structures need to be assessed but as a consumer I want to know why our prices are so high?

I know a lot of people now who buy from overseas for just about everything they can, either due to the exorbitant costs in Australia, or because no-one sells it in Australia. How many times have you gone to buy online and the seller does not even sell to Australia?

Does anyone know why it costs so much to ship product from the US? I ship from China and the price is way lower, and from the UK it also seems considerably lower (close to half for a similar package). Do the US shipping companies pocket large profits? I genuinely would like to know what causes the price differential for shipping? I would not be surprised if the cost of shipping is to bring the costs up closer to but just below the over seas prices for products… I am sure shipping companies are smart enough to adjust prices to maximise profits…

The drop in Creative Cloud pricing is simply a distraction from the ‘real’ pricing of the physical product. No serious Creative is using the Cloud product as it is too hard to manage multi-gigabyte files in and out of the cloud.

Was thinking the exact same thing. Your physical box and download licenses use the same sign in system. You just can’t port them around from user to user. Will most likely look at this when it is time to upgrade to CS6 although I will call it plan B. Plan A) convince the boss it is cheaper to fly me to LA for the weekend so I can walk into a best buy and buy our adobe licenses.

We use Adobe Creative Cloud here at SiteZero, and find it pretty flexible. Happy to hear the price is going down. :)

FWIW we don’t “…manage multi-gigabyte files in and out of the cloud…” at all – all our working files are stored locally.

You can store working files in the creative cloud, but we don’t (if we need that functionality, we tend to prefer other cloud storage services like DropBox). We find the pricing flexibility (month-to-month, add or remove licenses as required) of this model the main advantage for us. YMMV.

Call me cynical, but it strikes me as “lets try to get them onto our subscription model” now that they suspect the writing’s on the wall for their current pricing scheme.

If they can match US prices just fine on one product, then why such a discrepancy on the others?

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